The instant invention relates generally to insertion machines and more particularly to such insertion machines having computerized postage determination with or without prioritized selection of inserts to be placed into a mailing envelope.
Insertion machines with multi-feeder stations are widely utilized for mailing applications in which a plurality of different types of enclosures, such as account related documents, advertising enclosures or documents of general or limited interest, are to be included with a customer's monthly statement. Examples of such applications are monthly statements mailed by utilities, credit card companies and banking or other financial institutions. Included typically with the statement are one or more enclosures, or inserts, which may convey a message to the company's customers, such as an offer of additional services, or of a change in company policy, or advertisements provided by third parties for inclusion within the company's monthly mailing. Illustrative of such insertion machines are U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,935,429, and 4,077,181 issued to the assignee of the instant application.
Although current insertion machines are well suited for their intended applications, the evolving requirements of the marketplace now demand insertion machines capable of making last minute decisions regarding which documents or inserts are to be included in a mailpiece and a required amount of postage for the mailpiece.
An application where this capability may prove especially advantageous concerns bank checking accounts wherein a variable number of documents expressive of a customer's monthly statement, a variable number of cancelled checks and possibly one or more inserts of a general or advertising nature are required to be mailed. Due at least statement pages and cancelled checks between customers, the required postage for mailpieces produced will consequently vary over a wide range of postal values. As is well known, the present postage rate categories for first-class letter mail are ultimately based on a final, total weight of a mailpiece. Therefore, any procedure for determining the correct amount of postage for a mailpiece must involve at some point in the procedure a weight-determining step.
Traditionally, such a weight-determining step would comprise weighing the stuffed envelope. As insertion machine throughputs increase, however, this technique of weighing each mailpiece becomes less practical, more complex and hence more expensive for the customer. Furthermore, such a weighing technique does not lend itself to supporting other advancements in insertion machine technology, such as a dynamic selection of inserts based on priority levels and/or the extremely desirable goal of "topping off" a mailpiece with additional inserts to take full advantage of a monetary value of a postage category.
In response to this limitation the prior art has been known to provide an insertion machine wherein the per item weight of the inserts held at a plurality of feeding stations is stored in a data processing memory. A processing means, using the stored per item weights, calculates a total weight based on the number of inserts selectively fed from the feeding stations. This calculated weight is then utilized to determine which one of a plurality of postage meters, each being set to apply postage relating to a different weight category, will be subsequently activated to apply postage to the envelope. Such a machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,571,425 issued Feb. 25, 1986 to Jerryl Adams.
A problem arises in the use of such a system as disclosed in the Adams patent in that the processing means, which is an embedded microprocessor-based processing unit, is required to calculate the total weight of each mailpiece to the variation of the number of in a real-time manner while simultaneously controlling the activation of various feeding stations, postage meters and other machine components. This problem is made especially acute as the number of feeding stations is increased. Inasmuch as modern insertion machines rely on a "pipelined" stream of documents being processed at any given time in order to achieve a high mailpiece throughput, there may be a large number of mailpieces being processed at any given time by the machine. The demands placed upon the processing unit in controlling the operation of the machine and simultaneously calculating the total weights of a plurality of mailpieces may place a limitation on the number of feed stations which the machine may have. In addition, such processing unit demands may result in the throughput of the machine being limited to an economically unjustifiable low rate.
Another problem in the use of such a machine is that the machine, unlike an insertion machine disclosed in copending application Ser. No. 890,677 filed July 30, 1986 for L. Pintsov and entitled "Insertion Machine with Prioritized Selection of Inserts", does not address the desirable goal of optimizing the number of the included inserts in order to achieve the full benefit of the postage category into which the envelope falls Neither does such a machine address the problem of the selection of enclosures for insertion based on criteria other than weight, such as demographic or other characteristics of the addressee.
The foregoing problems are addressed and overcome by the instant invention which provides a method of determining the amount of postage to be applied to an envelope into which a collation of documents have been inserted by an inserting machine having a feed deck and a plurality of feed stations adapted to selectively feed documents onto the feed deck.